Re: SV: MySQL and PostgreSQL speed compare

* Lamar Owen <lamar(dot)owen(at)wgcr(dot)org> [001229 13:13] wrote:
> Jarmo Paavilainen wrote:
> > I run both MySQL and PostgreSQL as they are (minimum switches, no tuning, as
> > default as it can be). That is MySQL as the .rpm installed it
> > (--datadir --pid-file --skip-locking) and PostgreSQL with -i -S -D. Thats
> > the way most people would be running them anyway. And default should be good
> > enought for this test (simple queries, few rows (max 1000) per table).
>
> Comment to the list as a whole: believe it or not, most PostgreSQL
> newbies who are not DBA's by profession really DO run with the default
> settings. Maybe benchmarking with both the default and the recommended
> settings (which are not really adequately (read: clearly and concisely)
> documented as being the _recommended_ settings) would have its uses.
> But just benchmarking with the default settings doesn't in and of itself
> invalidate the results.
>
> But, then again, if the default settings are so bad performance-wise,
> why _are_ they the default anyway? There should be good reason, of
> course, but I think maybe the defaults could or should be revisited as
> to applicability.

The truth is that it's difficult to do it right no matter what.

Either you try to grab as much shm as possible and possibly DoS the
box or break it for other applications:
"Hey, Postgresql ate all my shared memory and now gnome is broke!"
"MySQL exhausted all my swap space because it mmap'd 2 gigs of data
on my 32meg machine"
or something like that.

So the solution is for people to actually read the docs. :)

I can understand someone buying a car to get to and from work and
the movies, but you don't enter a racing contest without tuning
and knowing a hell of a lot about your vehicle.

I really don't understand why people expect computers to do everything
for them, the burden of using tools properly belongs to the user.

--
-Alfred Perlstein - [bright(at)wintelcom(dot)net|alfred(at)freebsd(dot)org]
"I have the heart of a child; I keep it in a jar on my desk."